"Barbara Hambly - Benjamin January 2 - Fever Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

bankers and planters and brokers had been buying their quadroon and mulatto mistresses dwellings like
these, along the back edge of the old town. These days just as many belonged to respectable craftsmen
and artisans, clerks and tailors, whose wives and families turned their eyes from their sisters and cousins
and neighbors of the demimonde.
His mother's protector had bought her such a house, when January was eight and his full-sister,
six. The daughter his mother had subsequently borne to St. Denis Janvier had recently been given the
deed to such a house herself, by a fat, indolent Creole named Viellard.
Most stood empty now, shuttered tight in the hot glare of morning. When Bronze John came calling, a lot
of people, no matter how strait their circumstances, came up with the money to remove for the summer
to one of the hotels or cottages on the shores of the lake, where the air was cleaner, in Milneburgh or
Mandeville or Spanish Fort. Those who hadn't done so from fear of the fever, which came nearly every
year-or from the horrible combination of summer decay and summer insects-reconsidered the matter
when the first cases of the cholera were diagnosed.
As he walked along Rue Burgundy, January counted off houses. After sixteen years' absence he was just
coming to know these people again. The yellow cottage belonged to his mother's dressmaker; the
two-and-a-half-story town house occupied by Dr. LaPlante and his family (currently residing at his
cottage in Milneburgh); the pink cottage owned by the perfumer Crowdie Passebon. The planks that
ordinarily bridged the deep gutter from the unpaved street to the brick banquette were one and all
propped beside the high brick steps. If anyone was home, no one was receiving visitors. Narrow spaces
gapped between house and house, pass-throughs, leading back to the yards behind where slant-roofed
outbuildings, of a sort January had never seen in any other city, housed kitchens, laundries, storerooms at
ground level and slave quarters above. Each house, even the cottages, was an enclave; each a little
fortress walled into itself. In New Orleans there was no such tangle of alleys as had cut and twisted
through the inner arrondissements of Paris, enabling a man to duck inconspicuously from one street to the
next.
But January had been brought up on this street and knew the quirks and features of any number of those
hidden courts. As he approached the pale green cottage belonging to his mother's bosom-bow Agnes
Pellicot, he found his muscles growing tense.
Agnes and her daughters had departed, like January's mother, when the first cases of cholera were
rumored in June. But the cottage, given to Agnes by her protector with a sizable annuity-when they had
terminated their relationship upon the occasion of his second marriage, had undergone a number of
remodelings in the years before Agnes owned it. One of these had included the erection of an outside
stairway up the rear wall of the building and the enlargement of one of the attic gable windows to form a
door.
That door was kept firmly locked, but the window of the gable beside it had only a catch. He might be
perilously close to his forty-first birthday, but January was fairly sure he could make the short scramble
across the roof to effect an entrance.
Whether he could do so with sufficient speed to trap his pursuer was, of course, another question.
He counted steps in his mind, tallied details. The possibility that whoever dogged him might be armed
tugged uncomfortably; so did the thought that there might be more than one of them.
He carried his medical bag, part of his persona as surgeon, like the tall-crowned beaver hat or the
threadbare black wool coat that became a portable bake oven in heat like this. Casually he brought the
bag up under his arm and fumbled at the catch like an absentminded man trying to open it while
pondering something else, just as he turned into the pass-through that led to the Pellicot yard. The
moment he was out of sight of the street he bolted down the narrow space like a spurred horse, tearing
off his hat as he ran, clutching the black leather satchel tight. He whipped through the wooden gate and
shucked his coat as he darted across the dusty yard, flung himself up the outside stairs as though the
Platt-Eye Devil of childhood legends ran behind. At the top he paused only long enough to find his
longest-bladed scalpel, then tossed bag and hat and coat on the topmost step to make the quick, careful
scramble across twenty feet of roof to the other gable.